After the Future. Franco Bifo Berardi

“Oh Mr Student it’s nice here, I can see a light down there … I feel hot … hot …” until its voice becomes hesitant. It starts singing a song, more and more feebly and disconnectedly, like the computer Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey as his wires are unplugged.

      Yakizakana no Uta was perhaps the most harrowing animated film I saw in June 2006 at the Caixa Forum of Barcelona, during the Historias animadas festival. Yet I perceived a common tone running through all of the works presented at the festival: one of ironic cynicism, if you’ll allow me this expression. Place in Time by Miguel Soares recounts millions of years from the standpoint of an improbable bug, an organic insect, as the world changes around it. Animales de compañia by Ruth Gomez uses ferocious images to tell the story of a generation of well dressed cannibals, young beasts in ties; they run and run to avoid being caught by fellows, colleagues, friends, and lovers who wound, kill, and eat them as soon as they fall, with terrified smiles and dilated eyes, into their grip.

      This art is no denunciation. The terms “denunciation” and “engagement” no longer have meaning when you are a fish getting ready to be cooked. The art of the twenty-first century no longer has that kind of energy, even though it keeps using expressions from the 1900s, perhaps out of modesty, perhaps because it’s scared of its own truth. Artists no longer search for a rupture, and how could they? They seek a path that leads to a state of equilibrium between irony and cynicism, that allows them to delay the execution, at least for a moment. All energy has moved to the war front. Artistic sensibility registers this shift and is incapable of opposing it. Is art simply postponement of the holocaust?

END OF THE FUTURE

      The publication of the Club of Rome’s book, The Limits to Growth, in 1972, by Donella Meadows, Dennis Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and William Behrens, marked an important step in the reversal of the progressive vision of the future. Although harshly criticized by many economists at the time, the book announced the surfacing of a consciousness of exhaustibility.

      Exhaustion plays no role in the imagination of modernity, and remains unthinkable in the first part of the century that trusted in the future. But in the 1970s, underground cultural currents started to signal the new horizon of exhaustion.